MLK Day endured long road of opposition before adoption

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The Martin Luther King holiday, first celebrated in 1986, wasn’t adopted by every state until 2000 when South Carolina signed on.

The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is universally celebrated across the United States with parades, festivals and service projects.

The path to adoption was more complicated.

The proposal languished in Congress 15 years after introduction before President Ronald Reagan signed it into law, then another 17 years for every state to sign on as a paid holiday. Advocates marched and made speeches; opponents resisted, using veiled and openly inflammatory language to block the measure. Even the National Football League, where Black people make up 70% of its player rosters, flexed its economic might to push one holdout state across the finish line.

King’s birthday was approved as a federal holiday in 1983 with North Carolina among the first states to adopt a paid holiday the same year. The first national MLK Day was celebrated in 1986 and by 2000, every state did as well. 

King was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, but the federal holiday, which focuses on civil rights, the use of nonviolent activism to demand change and public service is celebrated on the third Monday in January.

It wasn’t an easy task for holiday supporters, who pushed Congress to create the bill and have Reagan sign it into law. There was a second battle: convincing states to follow suit with a paid holiday, which also sparked emotionally- and racially charged disagreements, especially in the South.

U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduced the first motion to make King’s birthday a federal holiday on April 8, 1968, four days after King’s assassination in Memphis. It took 11 years for the bill to come up for a vote on the House floor but fell five votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to advance on a 252-133 count. Among the supporters were the CBC, the King Center for Nonviolent Change and President Jimmy Carter.

Supporters intensified their efforts, and the campaign got a cultural boost from musician Stevie Wonder in 1981 with the release of “Happy Birthday” to promote the holiday. The King Center organized a march on Washington that drew an estimated 500,000 people and King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, along with Wonder, presented a petition signed by 6 million people to House Speaker Thomas “Tip’ O’Neill (D-Mass.)

Two years later, the bill passed the House by 53 votes. O’Neill and fellow Democrat Jim Wright of Texas, along with Republicans Jack Kemp of New York and Newt Gingrich of Georgia, gave speeches supporting the holiday. Passing the Senate, though, proved contentious. North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, who built his political career railing against civil rights advances and was particularly critical of King, openly opposed it. Helms introduced a filibuster, then presented a 400-page file that accused King of communist ties.

Still, the bill passed the upper chamber by 12 votes, with Sen. Strom Thurmond, an avowed segregationist and a 1948 Dixiecrat candidate for president, voting in favor. Reagan signed the bill in 1983, and the first federal King holiday was celebrated in 1986.

By 1986, 17 states had followed, but Arizona was resistant to adopting the holiday. In 1987, Gov. Evan Mecham rescinded predecessor Bruce Babbitt’s executive order enacting a state holiday in Arizona.

“He said ‘Black people don’t need a holiday. Y’all need jobs,’” Dr. Warren H. Stewart Sr., senior pastor at First Institutional Baptist Church in Phoenix told the Associated Press last year. “That started the war.”

In response, boycotts were launched against the state and the NFL threatened to remove the 1993 Super Bowl from Tempe if a 1990 voter referendum failed. The referendum lost with 76% of votes cast in opposition and the NFL made good on its threat by moving its championship showcase to Pasadena, California – costing Arizona an estimated $500 million in lost revenue.  

Arizona voters approved the King holiday two years later. Super Bowl XXX was played in 1996.

South Carolina was the last state to approve a paid King holiday for state employees in 2000. The decision coincided with the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina's State House dome at the capitol. The stars and bars banner was removed from the capitol grounds in 2015 after the murder of Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

MLK Day is the only federal holiday where Americans are encouraged take a “day on, not a day off.” In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law a bill sponsored by Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights leader in the 1960s as a student, and Sen. Harris Wofford declaring a National Day of Service.

Nearly every major U.S. city – including Charlotte – celebrates the holiday with parades, street festivals and concerts in addition to service projects from community clean-up initiatives to food donations.

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